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Part 8: The Great Escape
(My sincere apologies to Hollywood)
Leslie Rübner
On Tuesday, 23rd of October 1956, just two weeks after my 19th birthday, shortly before 3pm University students in Budapest gathered in front of the statue of Sandor Petöfi (a 19th century Hungarian poet, killed in 1849 by Russian soldiers helping the Austrian Habsburgs) in Pest. This was the starting point of the Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule. This revolt was essentially nationalistic; one might also say chauvinistic in characteristic. Doubtless the presence of the Soviet Army on Hungarian territory, the visible outward signs of foreign influence (even the army outfit mimicked the Soviet uniform), helped to inflame Hungarian nationalism. In the early evening of the same day students, including my brother David and I went to the Hungarian radio station to demonstrate and to demand the broad-casting of our declaration. A delegation entered the building, but as time passed with no sign of their re-emergence, the crowd turned impatient and started throwing stones at the windows. The mob at-tacked a mobile recording van, that was in readiness to make a recording of the delegation’s visit. An-other car was set alight. At this stage, most of the students and young people left the scene in groups. From the Körut (Boulevard) new groups and, later on, armed gangs arrived. The crowd broke down the gate. Guards tried to keep them off with water hoses, at the same time tried to extinguish the flames of the burning car. Suddenly we heard a burst of gunfire. I must admit, I ran for my life. My brother David was running next to me asking me, “why are you running?”, but he kept up with me.
It was a grey Sunday morning on the 4th of November 1956. We were sluggish, lazy and slow to rise. Shabbat, the day before, was relaxed and happy. My father tuned in to the Free Kossuth Radio (the flagship of Hungarian Radio) for the news. The announcer was repeating a broadcast made by the Prime Minister Imre Nagy at 05:20 the same morning informing the Nation and the wider world that Soviet troops had attacked the Capital, Budapest. I remember thinking: ‘Now or never, this is the time to leave’. I must have said it aloud, because a swift answer followed saying: “You are definitely not going anywhere!”. I started reasoning with my father; we both knew what this invasion meant, but he was worried that the Russians would catch and imprison me. He suggested I go to a railway station outside Budapest and he thought I would return, saying that the Russians had stopped me. However, should I go ahead with my venture and succeed in crossing the border, he instructed me to make my way to London where his older brother resided. I arranged with a classmate, Tommy Kramer to meet me early the next morning to try our luck.
Monday morning, the start of a new working week, was a time when normally, crowds of people thronged to find a foothold on the trams or holding on to the door handles, hanging out like bunches of grapes and would make their way to work. This Monday morning however, the streets were deserted. Tommy and I (I with goose fat sandwiches prepared by my mother and wrapped in an old newspaper under my arm and with addresses of family in the West and my pair of tefillin), took a tram to the Southern Railway Station in Buda. From this terminus, the trains were leaving toward the west of Hungary and on to Austria. On arrival, we found the ticket offices closed. Nevertheless, we found a multitude of people trying to get on the waiting train at the platform for the border town of Sopron. We, without tickets, boarded the train. Two ruddy faced, sweaty rather fat, busty peasant women with wicker baskets squeezed against us. After a short wait, the train began very slowly to pull out of the station. At first, we were moving at a snail’s pace, but in the open country, we gradually picked up speed. One of the peasant women said loudly, making sure that everyone heard her: “I just do not understand this. Just look at all these people. This train is
normally empty. You see, Piroska, she turned to her companion; the rats are leaving the sinking ship. I never could leave my country! Could you?” With those remarks, she showed her contempt for her fellow passengers. We are all entitled to our opinions.
The train stopped suddenly in the open countryside. Some passengers disembarked and proceeded to walk across the muddy fields, sinking ankle deep in the waterlogged earth. The train moved on for a few miles and stopped again. Yet more people disembarked and as before pro-ceeded to wade across the deep mud. The penny had dropped. Suddenly we realised the reason for these unscheduled stops. I nudged Tommy to climb off the train and I descended after him. We were simply following the others. Believe me, this was not an easy exercise; one’s feet sunk deep in the soggy soft earth sticking to one’s shoes, making them heavy. Nevertheless, we caught up with a group of three walkers in front.
“May we join you?”
“Yes, of course you may. Presumably, you are also looking for the border”.
It turned out that these three people were Gypsies from the Lowlands of South-eastern Hungary. The five of us, two Jews and three Gypsies, joined forces in search of a better life on the other side of the border. By this time, the moonless night enveloped our little group in total darkness, and we lost sight of the other would be escapees. In the middle of nowhere, surrounded by the impenetrable darkness, we found ourselves meandering totally lost. Suddenly we came up on a farmhouse. One of the Gypsies knocked on the door.
“Excuse me” said he, “Could you, please, direct us to the border?”
The farmer pointed us in the right direction and after a couple of hours of hard and brisk walk, we came across a canal, which was the border with Austria.
The canal bank was cleared of all vegetation and dusted with white chalk, so it was difficult to approach the border unnoticed. Every 50 or so metres there were abandoned watchtowers. In the distance, the silence of the night was shattered by bursts of machine gun fire and search-lights were cutting through the darkness. Dodging the beams of light we decided to look for a bridge or at least a rowing boat to get us across. All we found was a blown up bridge. I was supposed to be good swimmer so I thought that this puny little canal should not bar me from my freedom, and I waded in [leaving my companions who were less able swimmers behind]. Swimming with shoes and fully clothed in freezing temperatures was not easy, but I managed. When I clambered out on the other side of the river in Austria, it must have been well after mid-night. As I mentioned, the night was a pitch-black. I stumbled on to a road then followed it to see where it would lead. The coat on my back had frozen solid. When I tried to bend the corner of my overcoat, it just snapped off.
Finally, I stumbled on a village. As I made my way through the dark main street, dogs on both sides of the road were barking like mad at me. To my surprise no one came out to investigate the reason for the noise. By the time I came treading the cobbles of the village main street, the villagers had become used to strangers arriving.
Suddenly I noticed a house with the lights on, I knocked on the door and a man let me in. I saw an old man propped up in bed, several people were sitting around him, looking sombre, and some of the women were crying. There was a man who understood Hungarian and I told him my story. He gave me clean and dry underwear and a cup of boiling hot coffee. After I had changed and drank my coffee, he volunteered to take me to the temporary Red Cross shelter that had been set up to cope with the influx of refugees to this border village of Pamhagen (Pomogy in Hungarian). There I was able to have a nice hot shower. Very exhausted, I zonked down onto to the spotlessly clean bed and slept. In the morning, I was surprised to find my companions I had left behind, sitting there, bright and cheerful. As it turned out, after some more searching, eventually they found a rowing boat and simply rowed across. We stayed in Pamhagen for, I think, three days. When we left, the old man [who was propped up in bed] was still among the living.
Three or four big buses pulled up outside the Red Cross building. We piled in for the long haul to Ried im Innkreis in Upper Austria. The Refugee Camp in Ried was a converted army barracks, set in secluded woods. Somehow, we had lost the Gypsies by then. An official ushered us in to a large hall; around the walls, there were 3 tier wooden shelves, about 2 metres wide, thickly covered with fresh straw. In the middle, there were trestle tables and benches. They told us to pick a place for ourselves on these shelves. We settled on a spot on the bottom shelf. (This was not exactly a good choice. There were families with children not quite potty trained on the shelf above.)
The hall was filled with young men and women, middle-aged people, children and babies, of course all Hungarian refugees. A vigilante group was formed, the “Camp Police”. Their declared aim was to weed out the communists and to “teach them a lesson”. Every evening these thugs told us how they beat up the communists they had found. Strangely, most of those so-called communists were Jews and that made us eager to leave as soon as we possibly could - but we were locked in for political and health screening, with armed police guarding the exits.
Of course, Tommy and I did not fit in, although I was not abused for being a Jew, being of similar age, sporty and well built, I was accepted by the riffraff there. Nevertheless, the anti-Semitism could be felt in the air, we decided to escape; we had scraped some earth from under the fence and got out. Once out, we had to find our way without knowledge of the German language. We came upon a highway and according to the road sign, Linz was 82 km away.
We started out toward Linz on foot and we came across another Hungarian refugee camp. As we entered the place, my schoolmate Tommy, who was not religious at all, told me not to embarrass him by refusing their food. Worried about anti-Semitic sentiments, he did not want them to realise who we were. According to Hungarian hospitality, we were offered ham on bread with wine. After complaining of a stomach-ache, I was given a loaf of stale bread. They offered us room for the night and a shower in the morning and then we were on our way again.
Unexpectedly, a lorry stopped next to us. My companion ran to the cab of the vehicle and asked the driver in Hungarian, “Are you going to Linz?” Without a word, he opened the back of the lorry and motioned to us to jump in. Once inside, he locked us in. After a short time, the lorry screeched to a halt and suddenly the door opened and the driver motioned for us to alight, we have arrived in the capital of the state of Upper Austria (Oberösterreich), Linz.
Wandering around town, looking for the British Consulate, unexpectedly I saw my girlfriend Erica (a fellow student of the Jewish secondary school, two years below me, the daughter of my father’s best friend and business partner) in the company of strangers. She told me that her parents entrusted her to some relatives from the provinces and instructed her to try to make her way to Canada, where members of her family were waiting for her. However, her guardians, after an ugly anti-Semitic incident at the Ried Camp, where the Camp Police had accused them of being Communists, and beat them raw, they decided to go on aliya rather than to Canada; and she decided go with them.
My father’s instructions (to go to London) went out of the window and I decided to follow her. We contacted the Jewish Agency in Linz who gave us rail tickets to Vienna. When there, the Jewish Agency put us up in a small hotel, we were provided with some spending money and we were issued vouchers for clothing from a department store. I telegraphed my maternal and paternal uncles in Madrid and in London, informing them that I had succeeded in escaping and was presently staying in Vienna, and gave them my address.
As a result, my mother’s brother flew in from Madrid and turned up at the hotel. He had forbidden me to go to Israel and ordered me to wait while he organised the rescue of my family from Hungry. I did not listen to him. My mind was set to follow Erica. While my uncle busied him-self organising the rescue of my parents and brothers from Budapest, I was getting ready to go on aliya. We were organised into a group of boys and girls and were taken to the Railway Station where I had my first taste of bananas, the first of many new flavours I tasted in quick succession. As we were walking down the platform, I spotted a man selling them.
The train pulled out of the station and made its way through the beautiful scenery of the Alps to Italy. My very first sight of the sea was when the train was approaching Venice on a causeway. In Venice, we were put up in a small, third-rate hotel. The local Jewish youth welcomed us and made us feel at home. They took us on a sightseeing tour. With no means of communicating, it could not be an easy task. We saw St Mark’s Square, the only one that is actually called a piazza, dominated by the Basilica of San Marco and the Doge’s Palace. This is where the Procuratie Vecchie (Old Law Courts) and Procuratie Nuove (New Law Courts) are. We saw the Campanile San Marco (the bell tower of St Mark’s Basilica). To the rear of the Doge’s Palace, we saw the famous Bridge of Sighs, which is the connection to the palace and the public prisons. Prisoners went to and from the Judgement Hall by this route. We saw many more of the tourist traps.
Eventually we boarded an Italian ship bound for Haifa. All the passengers seemed to be Jews bound for Israel, the first port of call was Piraeus the Port of Athens. Some of the travellers disembarked to go on a tour around the Acropolis in particular and Athens in general. Needless to say we, the olim, with no passports, could not get off the ship. The next stop was, Famagusta, the only deep-sea port of the Island of Cyprus; we weighed anchor way off the coast. The British Authorities, who at that time were fighting EOKA lead by Archbishop Makkarios, surrounded the ship with gunboats, nothing and no one would get off or on the vessel. Our boat carried on to the last stop, Haifa.
As Mount Carmel came to view most of the passengers went to the port side to see their land and the land of their ancestors for the first time.
Erica with her relatives departed for their destination. Tommy and I were getting ready to disembark when the harbour’s communication system came alive; someone asked - in Hungarian - the Rubner family to go to some office and present ourselves there. As Tommy and I entered, a man said “Shalom Hershi, baruchim habaim, I am your second cousin. Where are your parents and who is your companion?”
It turned out that the man was my mother’s cousin, an electrician for the port authorities. As my immediate family were the last remaining Rubners’ in Hungary, he made this announcement every time a vessel docked in Haifa. He took us to home, an old Arab house shared by two families. Although they lived in cramped conditions, they managed to put us up for the night. The next morning after a hearty Israeli breakfast of different dairy products, my cousin from B’nei B’rak turned up to take Tommy and I to my aunt, my mother’s younger sister Klari.
Auntie Klari went to Palestine immediately after getting married in the 1930s. My Uncle Moishe Simcha, a yeshiva bochur, was not equipped with the skills required to make a living in 1930s Palestine. He undertook any available work in the orange groves surrounding B’nei B’rak of those days. Not being physically fit; he brought home much less pay then the other men. In addition, Jewish workers could not compete with cheap Arab labour. Being of sickly disposition, eventually, he died of a tropical disease leaving my aunt to fend for two young children, alone.
Auntie Klari was an excellent seamstress, so she found a job with the well-known swimwear manufacturer, Gottex and managed to work her way up to a pattern cutter. She bought a flat off Rabbi Akiva Street, the main thoroughfare of the town. When we entered the flat, I found it to be spacious and well appointed. (When I visited the same flat in the 1970s, it seemed puny.) My aunt welcomed Tommy and I with another Israeli breakfast and with plenty of questions. Weeks passed and my aunt wondered how long she would have to feed another two mouths? Then I received a letter from Erica. She had enrolled in an Ulpan in the beautifully appointed Moshav Shitufi on Mount Carmel, Nir Etzion.
Tommy and I collected our meagre belongings and left for the Tel-Aviv Central Bus Station; somehow, we managed to find the right platform for the slow bus heading for Haifa. We tried to ask the driver to drop us at Nir Etzion, but with the language barrier, we had a problem. Suddenly the driver shouted out “Mi medaber po Hungarit?” (Who speaks Hungarian here?) Half the bus offered to help. When we disembarked, we found ourselves at the foot of Mount Carmel. We had to climb to the top where Nir Etzion stood.
During the War of Independence, Arab infiltrators overrun Kfar Etzion and Glubb Pasha’s Arab Legion occupied it. The Jewish survivors were given this beautiful spot on top of Mount Carmel overlooking Ein Hod an artists’ village, to re-establish themselves and called the place Nir Etzion (Etzion Farrow). By the way, from Ein Hod there is a clear view of the Tel Aviv Haifa highway. During the 1948 war the Arabs took full advantage of this and shelled the traffic bellow. The inhabitants fled leaving the quaint village behind.
In Nir Etzion, we found others from our school in Budapest. As the Moshav was a holiday resort, we were billeted in the empty chalets. Apart from Erica, there were a large group of Hungarians also trying to get a place in the Ulpan.
We spent alternate days learning and working the land. Unexpectedly, I received a letter, written in Hebrew, from the British Council for Aid to Refugees, in Jerusalem, informing me that they had found my parents living in London. The letter suggested that I make an appointment with a Miss Myers whose office was in the YMCA building. I went to find the nearest public telephone in the town of Hadera to call her. Miss Myers spoke fluent Hebrew, but I did not, nor did I speak any English, yet one way or another we managed to understand each other. She let me know that the British government had initiated a scheme for reuniting refugee families. She undertook to arrange my exit from Israel as well as my entry to Britain. To cut a long story short in June 1957 I boarded the good ship Aliyah at Haifa and I was on the way to London via Marseilles, Paris and Calais. The journey lasted about ten days. I disembarked at Victoria station. What struck me most was the mess.
My brother David was waiting for me. We took a bus to Stoke Newington where my family lived. The Edwardian house my parents rented in Bethune Road did not impress me, but inside, it was comfortable and spacious. I had a bath and was refreshed after the long journey. The first thing I had to do was to enrol in a language school. For this purpose, I learnt a few words from a dictionary. When the staff there saw me coming by myself and enquiring in English, I was put in the intermediate class. Of course I could not keep up, so I asked to be put down a level where I joined some other Hungarians including a couple of schoolmates with whom I am still friends.
One day I received a letter from Erica informing me that she was engaged to a Canadian and she wished me a good life. Erica divorced her husband in Montreal. She died of cancer in the late 1990s.
Tommy also had a few words to say. Addressing me as “Rubner!”, he complained that I had not had the decency to send him a visa to Britain and he subsequently cut all communications with me. After serving in the IDF, Tommy returned to his parents in Budapest.
I settled in London studied jewellery design at the Central School. Married in 1961 and started a family. In the 1970s, I along with my family, tried Israel again.
Kfar Etzion was rebuilt on the original location and is thriving.
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